Figure 4: Rosenthal reads Pindar.
Figure 5: Saint Jerome in his study. Antonello da Messina. 1479.
The same complexity in the filming, spatial control, composition and use of secondary textual references is repeated multiple times. The basic dynamic involves the introduction of the scene through a long take, the subsequent creation of a deep space composition, the presentation of multiple actions in that space, and the incorporation of various subtextual references. Perhaps the quintessential sequence of the film in this sense is a comic scene in which the prisoners are disposing of soil collected from an escape tunnel they are digging. It begins with actions and conversations that are apparently simple and insignificant. Using a tracking shot, the camera follows three French soldiers whilst they talk and stroll. When they eventually stop, they are positioned in the foreground of the shot. They are joined by two more soldiers who approach from the background, and once these move to the foreground they exit screen left. Again without any disruption to the continual filming, they are followed by the camera which now takes up another tracking sequence, only this time following the new protagonists (Fig. 6).
Figure 6: Continual tracking sequence 1.
This tracking shot continues until the two new French prisoners pass behind a German guard positioned on the other side of a barbed wire fence. When they stop to joke with him, the camera pauses too (Fig. 7). The resulting composition positions the two French soldiers in the foreground with the German guard in the middle ground behind the fence. In the background are rows of barracks that extend backwards and thus emphasise the central composition and strong lineal axis of the shot. Again, we see a deep space composition with direct Renaissance overtones in its perspective, disposition of architectural elements and narrative actions.
Figure 7: Continual tracking sequence 2.
Once the French soldiers leave the shot, the camera remains static and continues filming. A soldier on horseback passes left to right in the middle ground and, once out of shot, our attention passes to another group of German soldiers that enter the frame, this time marching towards the camera from the background. Eventually, these protagonists exit shot left, leaving the eye of the viewer focused on three officers still found in the background. In this one continuous shot, the story passes between five different sets of actions and protagonists without breaking the spatial and temporal unity of the filming in any moment. It is a visual sequence that reveals Renoir’s skill at choreographing actions and movements, and his understanding of the spatial and narrative possibilities of the deep space perspective image (Figs. 8–9).
Figure 8: Continual tracking sequence 3.
Figure 9: Continual tracking sequence 4.
Something similar is evidenced in the scene that immediately follows, which begins with the two French soldiers that exited the previous shot now seen digging an allotment in the camp. Behind them we see a bored German guard who strolls distractedly around in the background (Fig. 10). On the right-hand side of the image is a long wall that runs from the foreground to the background, perpendicular to the camera’s point of view. Operating as a compositional device that, instead of demarking distinct planes of action, unifies them in one long lineal perspective, this wall is a visual device that eventually emphasises the distance between the guard and the prisoners. It is around this distance and, hence, the compositional device of deep space construction that the humour of the scene revolves.
Figure 10: Continual long shot 1.
Initially, the prisoners seem to be simply raking their plot of land. However, when two other prisoners enter the shot and place themselves in front of the original two protagonists, the true nature of the scene reveals itself. Surreptitiously, the prisoners have spent weeks digging an escape tunnel. Cultivating the allotment thus becomes a cover for disposing of the excavated soil they have to get rid of. On the pretence of simply chatting with friends, the newcomers to the scene comically begin to shake out gravel carried in bags concealed in their trouser legs.
Once made, the joke is repeated by two other prisoners who again place themselves in the front of an already congested foreground (Figs. 11–12). On the one hand, the humour of the scene is based on the simple comic actions in the foreground. However, it also depends on the viewer continually being aware of the presence of the guard who remains visible in the background throughout. It is thus another scene based on Renoir’s control of actions, composition, movement and their combination in a deep perspective space.
Figure 11: Continual long shot 2.
In addition to being a clear example of the compositional influence of the Renaissance perspective tradition on Renoir’s cinematic spatial construction, this scene again involves the interweaving of social and political references that adds an extra dimension to the action and our understanding of Renoir himself. Whilst the soldiers joke amongst themselves about the roles they will play in their Music Hall Christmas Show, Captain De Boeldieu argues that he will not partake because he has somewhat particular tastes when it comes to theatre… “I am a realist”, he sardonically comments.
Figure 12: Continual long shot 3.
On the face of it, this comment could be read as simply a personal opinion regarding De Boeldieu’s acting ability and tastes, albeit, one he shares with the director.24 However, it also works in other registers outside the confines of the cinematic text. It functions as a subtle reference to class differences by distinguishing the more “refined” artistic tastes of the officer class from those of the privates who prefer the accessibility and frivolity of vaudeville.25 The constant references to class distinctions that appear throughout La Grande Illusion are drawn from Renoir’s direct experience. He had fought in the First World War and later, not entirely ironically, described it as “a war of respectable people; of well-bred people…a war of gentlemen”.26
However, in the context of this essay, De Boeldieu’s preference for “realism” takes us into the realm of Renoir’s own artistic tendencies and preferences. It refers us to the perennial debate about artistic movements; something of particular relevance in the 1930s as the Western traditions of the art world were being fundamentally challenged by modernism on all fronts, in sculpture, theatre, literature and, most significantly, in this context, in architecture.27 In painting and architecture, the challenge to perspective was not only based on the ideas of space and time most obviously inherent in Cubism, however.28 This challenge was also animated by a fascination with film as a fragmentary spatio-temporal medium that could reconfigure spatial representation, with Soviet montage being the main reference point in this regard.29
Renoir’s allegiance to the realist tradition was not challenged by this rupturing of space or by concomitant developments in architectural theory. Nor was it challenged by the new representational and temporally fragmentary possibilities of film itself. On the contrary, Renoir, as we have mentioned, saw film as a way of advancing that tradition through a direct analogy between the eye and the camera and, in particular, the long take and the nature of human sight. Pushing him, in directorial terms, to resort to a very specific set of spatial compositional devices, this approach not only stemmed from the director’s affiliation and sympathy with the Western pictorial tradition of perspective, it allowed him to rework that tradition in the context of the new medium.
Hence, what we see in a Renoir film is not just a subtle approach to narrative, and a clever and skilled control of movement and composition, but a modern reworking of unified space centred around a privileged point of view. Only for Renoir, that privileged point of view was not that of the painter or viewer, but that of the camera. We see the unity, objectivity and clarity of perspective space manifest in the control, order and clarity of Renoir’s cinematic space; a cinematic space whose raison d’être is an interpretation of film in the realist and humanist tradition.
The eastern tradition and ephemeral space: Tokyo Story – Yasujiro Ozu
In a similar way to Jean Renoir in the context of France
, Yasujiro Ozu was one of Japan’s most prestigious, celebrated and prolific directors. His catalogue includes fifty-four films produced over a career that spanned four decades. Umarete wa Mita Karedo (I was born, but…), 1932, is generally recognised as his first feature film, whilst Samma no Aji (An Autum Evening), 1962, was his last. Tokyo Story was made in 1954, almost a decade after the devastating end of the Second World War, and is representative of what could be called his “mature style”. It was also one of his most successful films and put him in the international limelight.30
As with many of his other films from the same period, Tokyo Story represents an investigation into the social and family structures found in a Japanese society passing through a period of historical change.31 The so-called Americanisation of Japan, a phenomenon well known worldwide during that period, is the implicit background to the film. Dealing with the everyday and centring on the question of family, its treatment of social and political questions is indirect and the subtlety of its narrative echoes that of Renoir in La Grande Illusion.
Typical of the shomingeki genre, the script of Tokyo Story, written by Kogo Noda, deals with the Hirayama family and revolves around a visit to Tokyo by provincial grandparents.32 By centring on urbanite children and provincial grandparents, Ozu draws attention to the gradual, silent and painful disintegration of the contemporary family. The lives of the protagonists occupy the foreground of the film through a dialogue whose style is deliberate, slow and sombre. Full of metaphors and contemplative phrases laced with melancholy, it gives his typical “compendium of everyday images” a strong melodramatic tone through which the everyday becomes poetic and seemingly important.33 In the terms of Gilles Deleuze, it is a film about the banality of the everyday.34
Despite the dialogue playing a central role in the presentation of the film’s argument however, Ozu was principally a director of images, and this film is no exception. It unites his most renowned visual and filming characteristics, that is, his tendency to film empty spaces, his use of a low-level static camera and the employment of architectural elements such as walls, door frames and windows to act as subframes demarcating the action. In terms of his “editing style”, it is also typical of his work; stitching sequences of static images together in a syncopated and deliberate series of shots which seem to move at 90-degree angles with every cut.
It is relatively easy to see that there is a direct relationship between these visual and editing tropes and the nature of the spaces he tends to film; the traditional Japanese town house or machiya, with its roots in the Edo period. Revolving around the central moya space, the plan layout of these houses is asymmetrical and modular in nature. The grid upon which it is based is directly related to the layout of the ken, the modular system used to construct the Japanese house, and consequently, the plan becomes a sequence of interconnected spaces put together like a series of dominos. Related to each other in 90-degree spatial relationships, the combination of these spaces forms the spatial template for camera movements in practically every Ozu film.35
Given that the spaces (or rooms) within this modular arrangement are not allocated specific functions, and the furniture used is portable, any space can be used as a bedroom or, alternatively, as a dining room or study. Not only are these spaces alterable in terms of function however, but they are also alterable in terms of size. The fusuma (the sliding walls dividing one room from another) are normally constructed from timber frames with paper (washi) screens and are easily moved leading to an interchangeable arrangement of spaces that, whatever their disposition, are connected in modular relationship with the others around them. It is an architecture that, as we shall see, offers a range of spatial characteristics that the director manipulates and skillfully exploits in various ways (Fig. 13).
These sliding screens add to the potential complexity of the spatial arrangement and spatial template that Ozu follows in his filming. However, they are also what he uses to frame the actions he films. These sliding screens fit within the modular plan and are thus themselves modular in size, reflecting the strict spatial relationships that revolve around the ken. Based on the distance between two columns, the ken (the construction standard of these houses) controls, and indeed creates, the modular, aesthetic that characterises the architecture in plan, interior appearance and exterior fenestration.
Thus, when Ozu frames his action using architectural elements and moves his camera through a series of 90-degree twists, he is presenting us with a syncopated perception of the space that is fundamentally informed, if not controlled, by the architectural characteristics of that space. When one adds to this the fact that his low-level camera is generally considered to reflect the view of a person sitting on the floor, it is a style of filming and editing that presents us with a view of the house interior in full accordance with the nature of the traditional domestic architectural space and its use. In short, he creates a culturally specific cinematic on-screen space fully imbued with the formal qualities of traditional Japanese architecture. However, this architectural-filming relationship does not tell the entire story in regard to the principles underlying Ozu’s “filming style”.
Figure 13: Fusuma divide the interior into modular spaces.
The film historian and critic Donald Richie has underlined the roots this style has in the deep and complex cultural traditions of Japanese art and culture. Richie emphasises that the pictorial qualities of Ozu are not only of the product of the architecture in which he sets his films but, in large part, result from the compositional sensibilities typical of his cultural background.36 These sensibilities, he argues, are known in the West through Japanese woodblock prints which came to be a reflection of popular culture in the Edo period, the ukiyo-e.37 In the ukiyo-e we find virtually all the compositional techniques used by the director and thus a clear indication of the variety of influences that thread themselves through his work (Fig. 14). Common to this tradition, for example, is a low-level point of view, corresponding compositions weighted towards the lower part of the image, the demarcation of protagonists by architectural elements and the predominance of actions in the fore or middle ground seen front-on, all compositional characteristics typically repeated in the work of Ozu.
Figure 14: Women restrain a young man. Kitagawa Utamaro. ca. 1795/95.
This tendency to employ architectural elements to define actions, figures or views, both in the work of Ozu and in the pictorial tradition of the ukiyo-e, is also seen in one of the other most notable characteristics of traditional Japanese domestic architecture, its relationship with the garden. As with the architecture itself, the tradition of Japanese gardens is complex and multifarious and there are several types, each with individual characteristics. However, in general terms, it is possible, for our purposes here, to highlight a number of shared features such as the presence of water, either real or symbolic; the use of enclosure devices such as hedges, fences and walls to control views; and the use of symbolic elements such as bridges, stones and lanterns.38
Some gardens, such as the Karesansui, use raked gravel to symbolise water and rocks and moss to represent ponds, islands, rivers and mountains. The Tsukiyama gardens are known for copying famous landscapes and creating very deliberate views from inside the house and garden to natural elements in the distance. Chaniwa gardens are designed for settings in which the tea ceremony is key and usually incorporate pathways that lead people along routes of “mental and physical cleansing” before they enter the tea ceremony hut.39 Domestic gardens may have all these elements but are distinguished from other types by the fact that they are designed to be seen from inside the residence. Designed to be seen from inside the house, they are invariably seen by somebody sitting on the floor looking through an open screen. Consequently, the view is framed by the architectural elements we have been describing and are also characterised by compositions in which the weight of the composition falls in the lower part of the image. In his extensive descriptions of the Japanese house and garden, the historian Heinric
h Engel refers to this very deliberate and composed interior view as a “live picture wall”40 (Fig. 15).
Figure 15: The interior view: a “live picture wall”.
The importance of these compositional characteristics in the design of Japanese houses and gardens is seen in the interior decoration of the houses which often adorns the partition screens with replicas of this view or, alternatively, the view of a larger landscape. In the examples in which the garden view is replicated, we inevitably see a framed view of a simple garden whose compositional focus is in the lower portion of the image. When this image adorns the screen between house and garden, the replica effect is even clearer.41 In Tokyo Story, Ozu shows us all this in the most obvious way, through the creation of the self-same effect on screen. The camera takes up the position of the viewer (sat on the floor) and frames the view of the garden from inside the house for the cinematic spectator; the on-screen effect becoming another replica of the real view and the interior decoration that often accompanies it (Fig. 16).
Figure 16: On-screen replica of the “live picture wall”.
The Architecture of the Screen Page 29
